(11-03-2018, 06:06 PM)mikesez Wrote:

(11-03-2018, 03:21 PM)jj82284 Wrote: ofcourse it does.  Essentially, we eliminated rating for pre-existing conditions, merged pools like maternity and mental health and eliminated lifetime caps for insurance.  That all sounds great, just like a dry aged ribeye sounds great.  IT just costs more.  In this case, that cost was passed onto the consumer in the form of higher premiums and exponentially high deductibles that are invariably leading to the kind of rationing you lamented above.  

We should have learned by now that 2000 pages of bureaucracy don't reduce costs or increase resources.  It just results in an increase in the cost of compliance and a reduction in the number of producers and thus options for consumers.  

The market has always had a solution to making healthcare more affordable.  Doctors could self insure for the lower level care and pair that with catastrophic coverage for the heart transplant/cancer diagnosis etc. etc. etc.  There are practices emerging across the country that charge $50 bucks a month per adult for unlimited visits and service and have the same discounts on prescription drugs that we all get through our insurance programs.  Why aren't these more prevalent?  Because in the previous 10's of thousands of pages of Washington crap attempted price controls etc. etc. etc. they made medical associations more difficult to set up, and basically enshrined group health coverage because of tax treatment (and as a way around post WWII wage controls).  

So what's the solution?  Have Washington stop trying to HELP like a two year old with a chainsaw trying to fix their mothers broken toe.  Let producers develop products that work for consumers.  You'd think that the absolute horror show of the VA would serve as a cautionary tale about the government running healthcare, but people still believe in fairy tales.

There is no single silver bullet.
The way insurance, both private and Medicare, is structured encourages a lot of administrative overhead especially at the hospital and inpatient physician level. It encourages a lot of waste in sending codes back and forth. The government could encourage more capitation, and that could really help, but I'm not sure.
It would also really help if we made it easier to become a doctor. It shouldn't take so many years of education and residency.  More people would do it and as the supply of physician labor increases the cost per unit will go down and the individual doctors will have more life satisfaction is they won't be expected to work so many hours.